Anyone who has seen Cunningham dance, and admired her meticulous accuracy and classical grace, might be surprised to see her tackling the ferocious furnace of language, hip-hop rhythms and archaic prosody that characterise the poetry of Tempest. Yet it’s from that absolute contrast of aesthetic that the work’s special beauty develops.

We Shall See the Sky, at the What Remains festival. Photograph: Stephen Wright

Cunningham and her three dancers (two men, one woman) are uniformly dressed in black, and at first their classically stretched limbs, poised balances and precisely graduated shapes seem to occupy a more rarified space than the passionate, full-on delivery of Tempest’s recorded voice. Gradually though, we come to see how Cunningham’s scrupulously sensitive reading of the poems doesn’t limit but amplifies their force.

Initially, it’s the choreography’s responses to the rhythm and vocal music that are most striking: moments where the force of Tempest’s quasi-rap delivery sends a current of spiking energy through the dancers’ footwork, or where passages of more melodious lyricism float them on longer phrases of movement. When Tempest’s voice rises in intensity, the four dancers move in more concentrated unison, and the patterns that they form and re-form seem to map out the space in which the poetry’s emotions lie.

There are moments, too, of more figurative interpretation. The dancers revolve on the spot as planets spin in the poetry; they touch the floor; they move with softness or with hard resistance; they clench their fists or gently touch each other in response to specific images. When Tempest declares that she feels herself becoming “bigger than all the buildings”, Cunningham stands in a long ecstatic balance, one leg extending upwards, arms reaching out to embrace the world.

This sounds more literal on paper than it appears in performance, where over the course of 30 minutes, the dance steadily becomes more deeply and passionately embedded in the choreography. Julie Cunningham is still at a very early stage in her choreographic career, yet We Shall See the Sky is a wonderfully crafted, original work, which could easily expand to a larger stage.

Fred Herko: the life and dramatic death of an avant-garde hero

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A very different encounter with language comes in Jamie Atherton’s Possibilities for a Pleasant Outing, a “performance memoir” of dancer Fred Herko who, while almost forgotten now, was once a bright-burning star of the New York avant-garde. Back in the 1960s, Herko’s contemporaries saw him as a man overly blessed with talents – beautiful, clever, a gifted musician and an even more gifted dancer, who performed in everything from experimental Judson Church events to commercial television. Yet early in his career, Herko became addicted to drugs. A friend once had to rescue him from a downtown diner, where he was dancing crazily on the counter, covered in filth. A few days later, he jumped from the window of a fifth-floor apartment, naked, with the sound of Mozart’s Coronation Mass blaring from the gramophone. Some thought the 28-year-old was hallucinating as he died, imagining the perfect, Nijinskyan leap; others believed this was the “suicide performance” that he’d always promised to dance. Andy Warhol, who was fascinated by Herko, believed it was the latter and was said to have lamented that he hadn’t been present to film it.

Warhol did, however, catch him on camera before that, in the 1963 film Roller Skate, in which Herko attempted to dance all over New York on one roller skate. The film is now lost, but Atherton reimagines it in his own 35-minute solo, dressed in the same WMCA Good Guys sweatshirt that Herko wore in the film; executing his own one-skate “dance” while simultaneously reading aloud extracts from memoirs and biography that related to Herko’s life.

It’s a curious, chancy little solo. Perhaps in tribute to Warhol’s trademark style of blurring art and life, Atherton makes no effort towards a polished performance. Hunched, wobbling and tense, he scoots aimlessly around the studio, sometimes pausing to balance awkwardly on his one skate, at one point attempting a half-baked imitation of the classical attitude in which Herko glided through New York, his leg gracefully lifted behind him, according to Warhol, his “head lifted” his “throat free.”

Atherton’s vocal delivery is just as casual as his physical style. The material he’s assembled is riveting, portraying Herko’s New York as a place of skuzzy apartments and glamorous parties, of artistic ferment and promiscuous gay sex. Yet Atherton doesn’t attempt to make any kind of theatrical impact with the story – on the contrary, he stumbles and mumbles his words and occasionally drops the paper he’s reading from.

What might seem like wilfully irksome defects in another context, however, make a kind of sense here. Herko was attempting the impossible in Warhol’s film – towards the end of his marathon performance he was apparently hobbling and bleeding, and his pain was said to have been as interesting to Warhol as his most dancerly flights. Like Warhol too, Herko identified himself with a culture that rejected the polish of high art for the novelty of the pedestrian and raw. And most interestingly, to Atherton, Herko was also part of a gay community whose history remains largely untold, so what’s known about him now has been gleaned from fragments of gossip and anecdote. Atherton’s fragmented, half-achieved solo attempts to honour all these elements. And even though, as a standalone work, it’s too awkward and tenuous to succeed in a theatre, it takes on a convincing resonance in this festival context – lodged among works exploring parallel ideas, among artists making parallel journeys.